The Café - What Took So Long — Myriad Misadventures

We started working on ‘The Map’ in October of 2018. We filmed it at the end of December and it was posted in January. So it only took about 4 months from start to finish. Then we met to start planning ‘The Café’ in February. If we had kept to the same schedule as with ‘The Map’ we would have been done by May. But we didn’t and we weren’t. We started in February but we didn’t film until the second half of August. And the video wasn’t finished until the beginning of October. So why did ‘The Café’ take so much longer than ‘The Map?’

A number of things conspired to keep ‘The Café’ from getting finished quicker. The first was timing. Dan seemed much busier this year than he was at the end of last year. The planning for this video also went right through both Chinese New Year vacation and summer vacation. I travel a lot so I wasn’t around. Between both of these Dan and I had much more trouble meeting up to plan and practice than with ‘The Map’.

Next was location. When we filmed ‘The Map’ we had an idea for the fight but location was open ended. So we just found a cool spot. There weren’t really any requirements. But early on we had brainstormed ideas for future videos and doing one in a café or bar was a pretty early idea and we decided to use it for the second video. So this time location came first and we made the story and fight fit the location. The big difference was that with ‘The Map’ we were just in a random outside spot but for ‘The Café’ we were in a commercial location. A location that has to open and close and has customers. So with ‘The Map’ we could go and practice whenever but with ‘The Café’ we needed to work around Jazzgarden’s schedule. Taken together with our scheduling troubles it meant it was really hard to practice there. Dan is there a lot and I went a couple times to see the location but we didn’t actually practice there until maybe a month before we actually filmed. We did most of our practice outside Max’s bar (where we almost filmed) which was okay, but meant that we couldn’t get a great idea of distancing and stuff.

We were also a little worried about the actual filming. The end of the video is filmed outside of Jazzgarden. There are often a lot of people there. We were worried that we would have trouble filming with lots of people around so we figured we had to film during a weekday morning/afternoon when lots of people would be at work. Unfortunately Dan and I are also usually at work during that time so we had to film during our summer vacation. But like I mentioned above I travel a lot then. So we ended up just squeezing filming in at the end of vacation before we had to go back to work.

With ‘The Map’ we learned a lot about choreography and filming and editing during the process or making the video. With ‘The Café’ we definitely continued learning about that stuff but we also learned a little about parts of the process not related to technology or the actual fight. Filming in a commercial location definitely made it a little more difficult, even if it made for a (hopefully) good video. It’s something we’ll certainly keep in mind when we start working on the next one.

We had a lot of fun working on ‘The Café’ and can’t wait to start our next video. Hopefully you’ve all enjoyed it at least a little. If you’ve got any advice or feedback please leave a comment!

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